Sharing in OneNote 2013

I love using OneNote to keep track of stuff that I need to do and have it available on my laptop, iPad, Windows Phone and PCs at work. What I love even more is using OneNote to add to the list of things I want my husband to do in our shared home notebook.

In Office 2013 we have simplified the sharing experience for OneNote: you can share directly from OneNote 2013, to any email address, your friend doesn't need to sign-in to view it and they don't even need to install OneNote to edit it. You can also get a Sharing Link and share anyway you want to: email, blog, your favorite social network, etc.

Bonus: this also all works for Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Visio.

Sharing a Notebook

I will pretend I don't have a notebook shared with my husband and show you how easy it is.

Now I will pretend I am my husband…. (good thing I am typing this and I don't have to lower my voice 😉

1. Receive a Sharing notification email, click on the notebook link

2. See the notebook

3. Get to work on that to do list!

And that is all you need to know to share a notebook. I have included a FAQ but if you have more questions or feedback please post them below.

FAQ

I have written all my recipes in a notebook and want to share it with all my Facebook friends, how do I do that?

Easy as pie!

File ->Share -> Get a Link -> Select the type of Sharing Link you want and click the Create Link button.

Right click on the link and Copy it

Go to Facebook and paste it, post it

Watch the likes come in 🙂

I have a local notebook, that I would like to get on SkyDrive, how can I do that?

File -> Share

Select a folder for the notebook

Give it a name

Click Move

Yikes! I shared a notebook with someone and now I don't want them to have access, what do I do?

File -> Share

Right click on the person (or Sharing Link), Remove User

Note: You know that thing that wipes people's mind in Men in Black? Yeah well we don't have one of those. If the person has opened the notebook we don't close it on them but they will not see any new updates and will not be able to edit your notebook.

I have another question. How can I ask it?Please post it in the comments below.

Nicole, I am used to sharing my notebooks on my own network and nowhere else. I do not want to share my notebooks anywhere else. I do not want to use SkyDrive, nor do any of my customers. (I am a Microsoft Partner). Now I cannot find a way to share my notebooks between two computers on my own network. Is there a work around for this or is MS forcing me to use their cloud services, which will not happen?

I would love to be able to share only at the page level. But, i understand it may be at the group or section level. Sharing the entire notebook is too much. Typically, the notebook for me is not based on project but topic. So i may have multiple topics noted between clients. I would rather not create separate notebooks for each client. The note detail level is just not required.

@Jon: Storing a notebook on your own computer or on a network share is still a supported scenario. If you go to File -> New and select 'Computer' in the list of options, you should be able to create one locally.

@Kevin: Thanks for the feedback Kevin. Unfortunately, we only support sharing notebooks at the moment, though we are looking into how we can make this experience better.

In the past, we could share a notebook on a SharePoint Server with a group and keep those shared notebooks in sync with each OneNOte user's offline notebooks. But now in 2013, I do not see an option to sync with a SharePoint Server, Only Office 365 Skydrive. My company will not be adopting Skydrive for now. Is the option to sync shared notebooks with an on-premise SharePoint 2010 server now removed form OneNote 2013? If not, where do we go in OneNote 2013 to connect directly with our existing shared notebooks on our existing SharePOint servers?

@ChiTim – OneNote 2013 does sync SharePoint notebooks. Where do you not see that option? If it is the screen shot in the post – that is showing an example where someone doesn't have SharePoint. If they had SharePoint it would also be listed. Thanks!

@Nicole How does it know I have or do not have SharePoint? In 2010, you just give it your SP URL and sign in. There is no option in 2013 to do that. When we choose add, we get Skydrive personal and Office 365 SharePoint as options. We don't have Office 365, we use Office and SP server locally (SP 2010 Server). There is no longer an option to add a SP site in Onenote 2013 that we can see.

When sharing a OneNote on Skydrive I choose Can Edit and I do not tick the box Requiring users to Sign in before accessing the document. However, although they can access, they can't edit unless they sign in …. is this correct??

@thickernell It looks like you have to open an existing Notebook from SharePoint (in your browser and let it launch OneNote), before "Other Web Locations" becomes available as a new/open location. From there you can browse to your SharePoint site to create/open a notebook stored on SharePoint.

I've just done this on my Surface RT (running the 8.1 Preview).

I haven't found a way to get the Metro (win 8) app to open a SharePoint location… it only seems to like SkyDrive and Office365.

What exactly happens when you check the box: "Require users to sign in before using a document."? I can't find any reference to it in the help files. How does the person sign in? Do I need to send them some sing in information? Please explain a just what is meant by this check box item>

@BD – When you check the "Require users to sign in before using a document" – that means the users will need to sign in with a Microsoft Account before they see it. You do not need to send anything to them – they can use their existing Microsoft Account or they can create a new one. I hope this helps.

Nicole, Our firm is using OneNote 2010. I'm using OneNote as a report sharing with a team that would need to only view the contents. I'm interesting in having 2 types of persons: View-Only and Write-View.

I saw the last question ("Yikes! I shared a notebook with someone and now I don't want them to have access, what do I do?") and was wondering if the select user option is new in OneNote 2013 because I don't see it in ON2010.

However, If the user has a read-only access on the network drive on which the OneNote Notebook is located, will he also only have a read access in that Notebook ?

Anyone know how to share a Skydrive notebook with a sharepoint site so that the two locations will sync with each other. I can change location of the skydrive notebook to the sharepoint site but then it doesn't sync it just creates a copy. All very frustrating. I'm sure it was easier in 2010 version

Thank for you the straightforward post. I am experiencing inconsistent behaviour when it comes to OneNote Web App requiring folks to sign in. Even though the share link was created with the checkbox which requires users to sign in unchecked users are still required to sign in. Is there anything I am doing wrong? Does this behave differently depending on the content, type, size of notebook or does it work differently in different web browsers?

I like linking my onenote pages to appointments on my Outlook Calendar by clicking on the OneNote button from the open appointment. When I am offsite, I cannot get to my Outlook calendar without using a cumbersome, slow, remote access method. Plus, OneNOte is not available on the remote access desktop. I am able to publish my Outlook calendar to the internet in read only form. Is there a way to link the notes I take at meetings offsite in OneNote to my work Outlook Calendar so I can go back to any meeting, click the OneNote button in Outlook and pull up those notes I took while I was offsite?

How do I email handwritten notes to someone? I'm using a surface pro 2 (a very cool piece of hardware!) and office 2013. I can email the notes, but when the recipient opens it, my handwriting is not visible.

If we both have OneNote apps on our computers how can we make the shared notebook always appear in our list of notebooks in OneNote? (without having to go to the intial sharing email each time) – I want us both to always have a synced version of a notebook that we can both edit.

Is there an API with which I can share a website (e.g. blogpost or tutorial) from a website to my onenote webapp as it's possible with evernote? I think it would be great to see onenote buttons along with facebook and twitter buttons spread on webpages!

When I share a link to a Onenote notebook, does that person have to have OneNote installed or can they open it and edit it in a browser?

Does it work with OneNote 2010?

My email is done through gmail. When I click on "E-mail Others About the Notebook" I get an error "OneNote cannot send the email. This could be caused by a network connection problem …. etc" Is there a way to fix this?

@Nicole – we are using OneNote 2013 and Sharepoint 2010. When we go to File > Share > Invite People we see this message "Inviting People isn't enabled here, Please in touch with your help desk for more information". "Get a Link" is also not shown in the menu. Is there a fix for this?

Hi Nicole. Thanks for your clear advice. I'm running Office 2013 and happily been using OneNote for some time now. The OneNote file is stored on SkyDrive. Recently I tried to share with a couple of others. During the sharing process Outlook prevented me from sharing by a pop-up which asked me to type a human readable, but not machine readable, code to stop spammers. The pop-up dialogue box informs me I have completed the "test" correctly and I can close the box. However it won't proceed passed this step and I am stuck in this security loop. Any ideas how I can overcome this problem as I haven't seen the problem described anywhere on the internet?

I was asked by a coworker if I could send her one of my notebooks for her to keep in her OneNote. To clarify, NOT sharing…she wants to keep it for the notes I have, reorganize or whatever in her OneNote. I'm fine with it but will it disrupt everything on my end? What is the best way to do this or is it not a good way?

Hi. Thank you for your post. I was wondering if there was a way to make co-auhoring in real time vs having to wait up to 20 seconds. I would like to see each pen stroke as it happens and I cn not do that at the moment.

I love one note. I have shared a notebook with 2 employees who have been able to access it. I also allowed them to edit. It is very important that all three of us are able to add content. They have reported that they haven't been able to edit. One did, at one point, but then it stopped allowing. I have noticed that the edit went through when I didn't have it open on my computer. Is this what needs to happen or is this an issue that needs to be corrected?

AWESOME!! I didn't realize what a cool thing it would be just to update my OneNote. Thank to you and your blog, I updated and posted a "page" to my Facebook (I've been wanting to do this for the last nine months). Thank you thank you THANK YOU!

I would like to share a notebook with 3 persons. Basically, I will be creating the original document that will be shared with them (permission: edit). I want to be able to keep record of when they delete text any note I have posted. Is that possible? Right now, they can freely delete text AND history (without me being able to prevent that), and I don't want that to be the case. How to proceed?

How long does it take for the "share" email to be sent out? I think that I am having issues with sharing a notebook with others. I have contacted them and none have received an email about receiving the shared notebook.

Having a major problem. I have had a notebook shared with a colleague for several years now, and recently when she tried to open t she gets this error message "We couldn't open that location. It might not exist or you might not have permission to open it. Please contact the owner of (my notebook) for more information." But I DO have her under my shared group. What is wrong?